Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/294

 *tea and various liquors. They drank small-beer for breakfast, and knew the taste of herrings before the Turks invaded the nerves of Christendom with coffee, and the Chinese began to tan its stomach with the acid of teas. At twelve o'clock, a cup of malmsey, with a wedge of venison-pasty, scared up no megrims in constitutions which had followed the deer through the forest into the larder, and had pulled it down there with dexterous hands into the dish. Imogen was a prime cook, dressed vegetables in various devices to make them dainty to the eye, and flavored broth fit for Juno. She never caught cold on the floor of the cave. The forest was as courteous to her as the court.

Not one of Shakspeare's women utters one line that is inspired by any form of hysteria: the perfect balance of the functions was not yet impaired; so that no nerve-centre could exercise a petty tyranny, nor suggest the morbid fancies and curious superfluities which dedicate so many late romances to St. Vitus, the patron of spasm.

In an admirable book upon "Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls," I found embedded in an excellent vein of common sense the following obscure statement, quoted from another author: "Peripheral influences of an extremely powerful and continuous kind, where they concur with one of those critical periods of life at which the central nervous system is relatively weak and unstable, can occasionally set going a non-inflammatory centric atrophy, which may localize itself in those nerves upon whose centres the morbific peripheral influence is perpetually pouring in." Here